This practice-based research project argues that the landscape is operating as an archive in the Anthropocene Age, because it bears a permanent geological trace of human activity through climate change. Similarly, an art archive preserves our histories and activities to reflect aspects of our culture. It is also a repository of our activities’ outcomes – of our achievements or detritus, depending on one’s viewpoint, so both landscapes and art archives reveal our traces. However, once something is perceived to be at risk, the fear of loss and the impulse to preserve emerges.

The book's narrative arc starts with the landscape-archive and articulates it with the art archive. It moves on to artists who archive their own work (as most sited practitioners do) and finally looks at artists who act as archivists of the landscape archive, thereby becoming artist-archivists of the landscape-archive.

It asks what do we want to preserve in the Anthropocene Age? The project engages with the way that UK and international approaches to sited artwork in the landscape, have changed over the last four decades, making specific reference to the sculptures made in and for Grizedale Forest.